Many care providers have a pharmacy that prepares medical doses for administration to patients that are treated by the care provider. In this regard, the pharmacies may employ a formulary to prepare medications in order to fulfill medical dose orders that are ordered by care provider personnel (e.g., physicians) for administration to patients. Some medical doses to be prepared may include compounded sterile products (CSPs) that may be prepared in a specially constructed and controlled environment (e.g., an “IV Room”) in the pharmacy. The process of preparing medical doses may be carried out in accordance with local care provider policy, governmental regulations, industry organizations (e.g., Chapter <797> of the United States Pharmacopoeia), or other applicable policies. For example, the preparation of medications may generally occur in a laminar airflow hood, isolator, or biological safety cabinet, by an operator (typically a pharmacy technician) who is tasked with preparing the medical doses. Once the medical doses are prepared, the medical doses may be required to be verified by a pharmacist prior to being dispensed from the pharmacy for administration to a patient.
In traditional pharmacy management techniques, medical dose orders may be provided to a printer that prints labels indicative of the medical dose order that are to be applied to finished doses once the doses are prepared. A pharmacy technician may be required to retrieve labels from a label printer and use those labels as work order travelers in the process of preparing each dose. Once the dose is prepared, the technician may apply a label to the dose. The completed, labeled dose may be set aside for a pharmacist to check along with, for example, source ingredients, medication receptacles used in the course of preparing the dose, and/or other material. In this regard, in order to check a dose, the pharmacist may be required to enter the clean room in which the doses are prepared and physically observe the materials associated with the dose order. As such, the checking of prepared doses may require the pharmacist to dress in protective clothing or equipment, which takes time and resources.
Furthermore, the only prompt a pharmacy may receive to prepare a medical dose order is the printing of the label. In this regard, if a label becomes lost or damaged, a dose may not be prepared. Additionally, prioritizing work also becomes difficult because the label stack at the label printer may be the only evidence of what doses have been ordered, prepared, and/or dispensed. As such, relying on physical labels alone to track doses may result in unprepared, lost, or duplicate doses. In some cases, pharmacies may produce duplicate labels as a matter of course such that the pharmacy must review each label against the other, already received labels, to determine if a label represents a new dose order that needs to be prepared. This practice may lead to increased administrative overhead in the pharmacy that add operational costs and reduce pharmacy efficiency.
Furthermore, while instructions for preparation of a drug may be recorded in official FDA-approved literature for the drug, pharmacy technicians may not reliably consult the literature when preparing doses. Rather, pharmacy technicians may memorize the steps needed for the most common drugs, and then generalize those steps to other drugs to be prepared without verifying the protocols associated with a particular drug. In this regard, if the dose order includes special instructions that a pharmacy technician does not recognize, references regarding the proper techniques may not be present or may not be consulted. Accordingly, dose orders including special instructions often must be prepared by more experienced technicians or at the direction of more experienced technicians. In either regard, the protocol used to prepare the dose may not conform to the FDA-approved literature for the drug being prepared.
Further still, in traditional pharmacy management techniques, the pharmacy technician may be responsible for creating records that are maintained in relation to doses that have been prepared and products from the formulary that were employed to make the dose. For example, a pharmacy technician may be tasked with transcribing information such as lot numbers, expiration dates, serial numbers, or the like. The manual creation of records requires labor intensive practices that may result in pharmacy inefficiencies, introduces the potential for errors in the records, and may result in virtually unsearchable paper records.